


Re: Hello

by randomizer



Category: Halt and Catch Fire
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:21:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23812234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomizer/pseuds/randomizer
Summary: Cameron, Donna, Gordon, Joe, and Bosworth care about each other awkwardly.
Relationships: Cameron Howe/Joe MacMillan, Donna Clark & Cameron Howe, Joe MacMillan & Gordon Clark
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	Re: Hello

**Author's Note:**

> I DID NOT WRITE THIS STORY. This little gem was written by Halt creator Chris Cantwell--he gave me permission to post it here--who promised to do it when a GoFundMe drive for his brother-in-law's medical bills reached $5,000. Naturally, fanfic written by TPTB is a tad . . . unusual, but we're living in unusual times, times when begging for decent health care via fanfic is one of the many mind-blowing things that we get to experience in our current dystopia. (Chris wrote the following tweet about it: _would've NEVER EVER done this. Our story is what our story is. But these are strange and desperate times. We've got to help each other. And I know you love these characters. Thank you for loving them. I'm sorry if I fucked anything up for you with this little tale._ )
> 
> The GoFundMe is still ongoing: if it reaches $20,000, we'll get a new Halt script, and I for one would LOVE to see that. Here's a [link](https://www.gofundme.com/f/emergency-help-due-to-covid19-and-renal-cancer?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=m_pd+share-sheet) to the GoFundMe, if you're inclined to give a little.
> 
> This story takes place between episodes 7 and 8 of Season 1.

A few weeks had passed since Gordon dug up his back yard in the middle of the night.

It was October now but the weather hadn’t yet let on that it was fall. There’d been no heavy rain since the thunderstorms that had swept through Dallas and Collin Counties—just the fringes of Hurricane Alicia but enough to make the St. Augustine sod behind the house easy enough to punch through with a good shovel. For a week after, Gordon had stayed home from the office. Wisely. After a good night’s sleep, what he’d experienced had seemed less like a full breakdown. He’d probably just been exhausted. And the girls hadn’t shut up about the giant that night. It had been the only thing that had kept them quiet, digging like that. At some point motor memory must’ve kicked in and he might’ve gotten a little confused . . .

. . . but that was it.

During that week off he’d mostly slept. He’d checked in with the boys in the Kill Room periodically but it otherwise had been naps and Taco Bueno. Since then, he’d been back working, trying to figure out how to reconfigure the “Giant” specs to Simon Church’s sleek bullshit case. It was actually proving to be easier than he thought, but the grudge he carried was still pretty heavy.

The only lingering reminder of his rough night was the pockmarked back yard. It still looked like hell—some kind of moonscape devoid of any green growth, small piles of dry dirt resting in mounds that had been weathering away for over a month, wind blowing topsoil into the fence and staining it brown around the edges. Gordon didn’t want to pay a landscaper to redo it. He was afraid of the cost but more so he was afraid of the embarrassment. How the hell was he supposed to explain this? Gophers? Maybe. Did they even have gophers in Texas? He’d told Donna he’d do it himself. Trouble was, work was still filling seven days a week, currently with the case adaptation and now COMDEX was on the horizon. But Joanie and Haley couldn’t play outside and frankly it was an eyesore to look at through the patio glass door, reminding all of the Clarks of that time Daddy had done something pretty troubling and rather unexplained.

That morning Gordon was at the kitchen table finishing up some toast. It was rare that he got to eat breakfast at the house but today he was taking the time. The fatigue was already setting back in and he was privately worried about flying off the handle in some other unpredictable way if he didn’t at least take care of some basic human needs. Donna entered in her bathrobe, hair wet, surprised to find him showered and up and not rushing out the door. It was only about 6:30 a.m. The sun was already turning the sky pink from the east and its soft backlight was now falling gauzily on the torn-up yard beyond the sliding door. Neither Donna nor Gordon were looking at it and for several moments she poured herself coffee and creamer while neither of them talked. The only sound was her metal spoon tinging against the porcelain of her mug and his absentminded crunching as he stared at the kitschy magnet tableau on their fridge.

Despite the shadows of the morning in the kitchen she could still see the wear in his eyes. “How are you?” she managed quietly.

“I’m okay.”

She sat down next to him with her coffee, pulling a half-done crossword closer. More silence continued. Things had been distant since that night, since his ever- increasing absences at home, and since her Lubbock trip with Hunt, something she felt she was still working her way back from at Texas Instruments.

More silence.

But then he spoke again, surprising her, ‘Don’t worry, I’m gonna take care of the yard. I haven’t forgot.”

She looked over to him.

“Are you sure you’re okay, Gordon?” He nodded, slowly stuffing the last line of sticky toast crust into his mouth, seemingly millions of miles away.

She pressed him, “Hey . . .Have you thought anymore about it? I wish you would.” His eyes moved to the table. She was talking about a therapist.

“I’m okay,” he said again, and got up from the table, taking care to scoot the chair back in. He grabbed his bag and headed for the garage. “Tape _Airwolf_ for me, will ya . . .” As the door closed so did Donna’s eyes as she leaned forward on the table, stretching her arms out straight in front of her. When her lids lifted again she was staring right at the upended lawn outside.

Then something caught her eye on the table in front of her. It was a small stack of mail; Gordon had a habit of just leaving it wherever he wanted should he ever bother to take it out of the box, and that habit had only gotten worse in these last few months. It was often up to Donna to treasure hunt for bills around the house in order to make sure their utilities never shut off or their credit card wasn’t cancelled.

Donna pulled the stack closer to her. On top was a brown envelope addressed to her in typeface. The return address was some distribution office for MCI, and “MCI MAIL” was stamped across the paper in black. She almost discarded it, thinking at first it was a mailer, but then she saw the red stamp that said “OVERNIGHT” in the lower right corner. She slid her finger underneath the adhesive and opened the letter with a nail. She pulled out a single-page transcript. The text hadn’t been spit out of a dot matrix; a laser printer had run this off. Fancy. The heading was bureaucratically blunt:

**MCI MAIL**

**TRANSCRIPT — OCTOBER 17 1983**

The actual text was much more interesting and unexpected:

Time/Date: 15:34:11 10-17-1983

From: chowe@mcimail.com

To: Donna Clark [Mailing Address *** Confidential]

Subject: Hello

hi it’s cameron (from cardif)f. im working on a program and

I need some input on DEC-20. seems you would know b/c T.I.

can you get a mci electronic mail account its new and works

pretty well that way we can communicate easily and i dont

have to waste too much of our time. obviously they also can

print off e-mails and regular mail them too which is pretty

cool but its way too expensive and inefficient im sure you

agree

thx

cameron (from cardiff)

Donna read the message again, hardly able to believe it was real. She set it down, ruminating as she went back to her coffee.

**§§§**

Joe had been there since before 7:30 and the first thing he noticed upon arriving was that Gordon wasn’t. It was hard not to be pissed off, as Simon’s case was still a shell—that was it—and there was no computer inside. Joe was beginning to suspect that the engineers in the Kill Room were truly Cro-Magnon, since they at least bathed like ones. While they lazed through cycle tests, he’d been haggling on the phone all morning for a better COMDEX booth. The lanyard drones at the convention center wanted to stick Cardiff in a back corner due to it being a late add to already limited space. He wasn’t going to let that happen. When the ignition switch of the Giant was flipped, it needed to be witnessed. Instantly. Felt, like a seismic tremor.

After slamming down a fourth failed phone call attempting to change booths and barking at Debbie to PLEASE try Scott Halperin at Dal-Tech Metal again so he could check in about the INCORRECT pigment shading to the mold—

—there was a knock at his door.

Gordon.

Unusually, Gordon walked in without an invite or agenda. He instead strolled across the carpet and took a seat across from Joe’s desk, sighing so loudly and to such an extent that Joe actually leaned forward and cocked his head in interest, wondering how long the exhale would go on. Then, finally, there was silence in the room.

Joe looked Gordon over quizzically. “Need something?”

Gordon met Joe’s eyes softly. Then shrugged.

Joe sat back, trying not to let his frustration overtake him. Gordon began to fidget with his fingers, watching them fold in and out against his palms. “I just had a question—”

Joe held up a hand. “Wait, before you . . . Okay. Just . . . before we get into what you want to discuss . . _is the computer done_?” Gordon’s shoulders sagged and he burned Joe with a scowl, “Don’t worry, we’ll fit it into its beautiful new prom dress, can I _just_ . . . _ask_ you something?”

Joe said nothing and instead waited, letting his silence answer. Gordon continued, “Does someone like you . . . sorry. Do you, a, uh . . . _man_ of your caliber . . .in your position. Do you ever feel . . . overworked?”

Joe blinked at him. Gordon waited.

Then Joe moved forward in his chair, opening a desk drawer to his right. He pulled out a stack of three cassette tapes and slid them to Gordon. “Here. Try these. Calming, tranquil, that kind of thing. Maybe it’ll help.” Gordon slowly pulled the tapes toward him: _Meditation For Today: Drawing From Tonglen & Other Eastern Techniques._

Gordon looked up at Joe, “Did they work for you?”

“Never tried them. Been too busy to crack them open. But I’ve heard good things.”

Gordon picked up the three tapes and examined them more closely. “. . . ’kay . . .thanks . . .”’

“Gordon, is there something specifically on your mind that’s tripping you up? Because we’ve got a lot of benchmarks left and I need to make sure—”

Gordon stood. “I’ll try the tapes.” Then he left. Joe watched him for a moment, considering him. But then . . .

“DEBBIE, I WANT SCOTT HALPERIN NOW PLEASE.”

**§§§**

That night, Cameron sat at her desk in the basement of Cardiff Electric cranking the Crucifucks on the stereo. The music wasn’t working. If anything it was distracting. She reached over and yanked the red and black wires from the receiver. She clenched her hair in the quiet that was soon interrupted by the clanking of water pipes reverberating through the cinderblock above her. She was well aware of every time the lobby security guard took a dump. So awesome.

For now the BIOS—still wooly and in need of touch-ups—was parked on two back-up drives in a locked drawer behind her (she was never making that mistake again). What was sending anxiety through her veins in the present moment was the unfinished work on her monitor. Writing this was taking forever. Bosworth could only float the books so long before they had to tap this pipe through the back door.

First Western Regional Bank was working off a timesharing system and it was clearly so new to its security and IT departments that they were still figuring it out months into its implementation. The topology was simplistic at best, but Cam couldn’t connect to the TOPS O/S because she had no access to a DEC machine or terminal. All she had was her PC in the basement and the last thing she wanted to do was go onto the Cardiff mainframe and use it for something like this.

Cameron hadn’t seen Joe in four days. He was tied up upstairs and she was tied up down here. Unlike the Giant, these projects didn’t overlap. If anything, she didn’t want him to ever find out about this one. Her general plan was to join the schedule remotely as an unassigned “ghost” user with read and write access, invisible to the ring but still connected. Despite the stakes, she was still trying to treat this task as a puzzle—a game—in order to keep herself level-headed. It was a distraction from the mother lode delivery of the Giant to the world in a few weeks, the blatant illegality of what she was doing, and from . . .well, from Joe.

He, too, had been hazier, still connected but at times invisible. The burst of warm blood that had suddenly begun to course through him months ago was now already cooling. He was turning into a reptile again, most likely to get ready for the shitheads at COMDEX. Even so. It sucked ass. She hated orbiting such a cloud of systematized humorlessness, and loneliness was a bullshit feeling she hated falling prey to because it made her feel weak and less ready to defend herself against any other assholes that might be lining up to take advantage of her.

She stared at the chain link fences of the inventory closets. She checked her electronic mail.

She had a new message.

Time/Date: 19:51:43 10-18-1983

From: dclark@mcimail.com

To: chowe@mcimail.com

Subject: Re: Hello

Ok I signed up for one of these. Was going to get one

anyway to try it out.

What did you need help with? I’ll do my best.

Sincerely,

Donna

Cameron immediately opened up a reply screen and typed:

Date: 19:52:09 10-18-83

To: dclark@mcimail.com

From: chowe@mcimail.com

Subject: Re: Re: Hello

hi great thank you do you have experience with SYSTEM-

20\. Am thinking of replacing my 8086 with a 32-bit

like a 68000 to try to run TOPS?

Minutes went by. Cameron popped open another Ranger and drank half of it before a new message appeared.

Date: 19:59:15 10-18-83

To: chowe@mcimail.com

From: dclark@mcimail.com

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Hello

That’s . . .a lot of work. You’re not making it easy on

yourself. They’re both configured in a DIP package

you’re going to need a heck of a lot of glue logic

just to make the inputs work. Plus you’re looking at a

completely different set of interrupts.

Why on Earth would you want to do this?

Sincerely,

Donna

Date: 20:01:01 10-18-83

To: dclark@mcimail.com

From: chowe@mcimail.com

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hello

no mainframe access avail remotely so was thinking of

trying to convert my personal here just to access

Cameron chewed her nails. Then:

Date: 20:05:27 10-18-83

To: chowe@mcimail.com

From: dclark@mcimail.com

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hello

Use Kermit? It can talk TOPS. Just install that to

convert the character sets instead of completely

replacing your CPU, which would be crazy.

Sincerely,

Donna

Cameron blinked. Oh.

Date: 20:07:04 10-18-83

To: dclark@mcimail.com

From: chowe@mcimail.com

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hello  
  


oh.

Cameron blinked again. How the hell had she missed that? Perhaps Joe, perhaps the BIOS, perhaps . . . Jesus, who knows. She sent a final e-mail.

Date: 20:08:00 10-18-83

To: dclark@mcimail.com

From: chowe@mcimail.com

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hello  
  


cool thanks

Cameron closed her eyes and leaned her head against her monitor.

**§§§**

Donna was waiting for another e-mail from Cameron when she got a call. She stood up from the dining room computer and answered in the kitchen. “Hello?”

“Donna, it’s Joe MacMillan. What’s going on with Gordon?”

Donna didn’t know what to say and honestly, she didn’t really want to say anything. She had no idea what Joe was up to at this moment but she wasn’t in the mood to try and suss it out. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he left early today. And besides that, he’s been seeming . . . off. I just wondered if there was something going on, and if perhaps I could help.” Donna covered the receiver for a moment and leaned in to peek into the living room. Joanie and Haley were watching _The A-Team_. “Bedtime in ten, you two.” Donna walked back into the kitchen, blocked from view by the overhead cabinets.

“Left early when?”

“I don’t know, I just went by his office and he’s gone.” “Well, it’s after eight, Joe.”

“And we have a machine in flux that has to be market ready in two months.” Donna scoffed. Joe carefully softened his tone and continued, “I just want to know if there’s anything I can do.”

“Everything . . .everything is fine here. Gordon is fine, he’s just tired, as I’m sure you are, as I’m sure everybody is over there.”

“Anything outside the office?”

“I don’t—that’s not really any business of yours.”

“I’m not trying to intrude.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Joe,” Donna said, eyeing the back yard. “If anything we have this . . . landscape issue, but . . .”

“What do you mean?”

Donna rolled her eyes. Then she added, “We need to redo our back yard lawn, Gordon’s been— trying to figure out, the, um . . .Anyway. Everything is fine.”

There was quiet for a few moments.

“Hello?”

“I understand. Thank you.” The line went dead. Okay. She hung the receiver up on the wall again and headed into the living room, wondering where Gordon was.

**§§§**

Cameron heard someone walking through the outer hallway and immediately closed the work on her screen, but it was only Bosworth. He glanced over to her sheepishly as he approached with a small white paper bag and placed it on her desk. She looked up at him wryly, “Cocaine for the final push?’

“Nope,” he said in a tired, awkward drawl. “Tacos. Thought you might, you know . . . be hungry.” He stuck his hands in the back pockets of his suit pants.

She rooted through the bag, drawn to the smell of grease and fresh onions, “Where from?”

He sidled up to her desk and took a seat on a stool, “These two Mexican dudes run a nice little operation out of a gas station off Forest Lane. Brothers doin’ their grandma’s recipe when it comes to the trompo.”

Cameron sunk her teeth into the small taco, nearly eating a third of it in one bite. “Oh man . . .yeah, that’s . . . yeah, that’s good.”

Bosworth fished one out for himself and unwrapped it. “They got tacos from wherever you’re from? Where was it? Mars?”

“Close. Houston. And yeah but nothing I ever actively sought out.”

“Guessin’ you’re not a barbeque connoisseur neither.”

“I don’t really . . .think about food. It’s like a means to an end to do what I wanna do. To me the best food is the food I can eat so I can just skip over being hungry as quickly as possible.” She polished off the taco, “Although I may need to rethink that philosophy after eating this.”

Bosworth tried to segue as smoothly as possible, “So how’s our little . . . all this goin’ down here?” He looked at her sidelong and she held his gaze, trying to figure out how to answer diplomatically.

“Uh . . . good. Actually way better, because I . . .learned something that’ll make it way easier than what I was gonna do.”

“Oh yeah?”

She fixed him with a look, “I mean I could explain it to you but your eyes might roll back into your head.”

He managed half a grin, “Maybe later.” He stood up after finishing his taco and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. He gestured to the bag as he stepped away, “There’s two more in there, both for you, make sure you get yourself a full dinner.” She nodded and he left. Before unwrapping another taco, she waited for a moment, again listening to the silence of the basement. She brought her screen back up again and gazed at the code that would allow her to enter the bank’s customer account systems.

She rested her fingers on the keyboard . . . but then brought up her electronic mail interface again:

Date: 21:47:04 10-18-83

To: dclark@mcimail.com

From: chowe@mcimail.com

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hello

do you have friends?

**§§§**

Gordon walked in from the garage into the kitchen. Donna was there waiting for him. He went into his well-rehearsed lines about needing a beer or two to unwind, citing in a monotone voice that the last thing he wants to do is bring work home with him and that sometimes he needs a little bit to put it down before he walks in to see the family . . .but he quickly realized that there was something else on Donna’s mind.

“Joe MacMillan’s here.”

Gordon stared at her blankly. “What?” He checked his wristwatch. It was past ten o’ clock. “Where is he, what’s he want?”

“He took the shovel out of the garage and the wheelbarrow and he’s in the back yard.”

None of that made any sense. “Huh?” He walked towards the kitchen table and he could see Joe’s suit coat, tie, and white dress shirt carefully laid over the back of a chair. The porch lights were on and he looked through the glass patio door.

Donna fell in behind him, watching something outside in the night, “I told him it was ridiculous to do this now and that we didn’t need his help, but . . .you know how he is with the word ‘no.’”

Gordon could barely see a tall man in a white t-shirt trucking a wheelbarrow full of dirt across the uneven terrain of the yard. “What is he doing?”

“He’s filling in the holes.”

**§§§**

Gordon walked outside into the dark. “Joe.” Joe stopped mid-shovel haul and looked over at the engineer, ‘Hey.” Gordon came closer. Joe had already roughly filled in three of the five zigzagging troughs in the yard. “Joe, what are you doing?”

Joe continued shoveling, “What does it look like?”

“This isn’t—fixing this isn’t just something we can do in a few minutes, we need to resod it—”

“I’ve got the sod rolls in the driveway. St. Augustine, right? Grab a shovel, once we level out the ground we can roll it down and water it.”

“The sod rolls are . . .Hey. Hey, I don’t . . .want to do this right now.”

“Tough,” Joe said, continuing to shovel. His shirt was already damp with sweat and smudged with dirt. He wiped the back of his brow with a filthy palm, brushing black strands of hair out of his face. “I need you one hundred percent focused at work right now. And if something like this is getting in your way, well, then we’re gonna get it out of the way right away.”

Gordon watched his product manager throw scoop after scoop of dirt into a deep trench, never pausing.

Finally, Gordon walked out of the side gate of the back yard and headed toward the garage, wondering where he’d put the other shovel.

**§§§**

Donna wasn’t even going to try to sleep during the sounds of two men digging out back in the middle of the night. She powered up the dining room computer again, bored and restless. Was it going to be Planetfall again tonight? How long would she have to play in order to distract herself enough from the thought of waking up and seeing Hunt in the office tomorrow morning?

But she paused at the prompt . . .and brought up MCI Mail instead. She had a new message from Cameron, so she read it.

And she had no idea how to respond.

**§§§**

Cameron was asleep at her desk while NetWare 86 continued to install on her hard drive. Then her phone rang, jolting her awake. She let it ring for a few moments, almost afraid to answer it, but she finally picked up. “. . . hello?”

Donna’s voice carried through the line into Cameron’s ear. “You know, you can just call me on the phone, it’s probably faster.”

Cameron’s posture subconsciously straightened. “I don’t . . . like . . .phones.”

“Okay,” Donna responded quietly, not wanting to investigate the answer. “Did you set up NetWare all right?”

“Yeah . . . yeah. Installing now.”

A silence followed. Both women continued to listen to the emptiness on the other end of the line. Donna looked out through the patio glass where her husband and Joe were now carefully rolling out grass carpet onto the dirt yard. “Are you all right?” she asked.

Cameron responded as confidently as she could. ‘Yeah. Yes.”

“Okay. Well . . . take care of yourself. You all seem to be burning the candle at both ends a little too much if you want my opinion.”

“Yeah. Totally. Yeah,” Cameron drifted off, thinking on that. “Thanks.” Then the phone call ended.

**§§§**

It was past 1:30 a.m. when Gordon and Joe both had garden hoses and were watering the freshly laid sod. The amount Joe had bought was short and there was a six square foot bare patch of dirt that was quickly turning into mud. Gordon had told Joe not to worry about it; he’d take care of the area, even though privately he knew he’d never get around to it and he’d have a dirt patch by his back fence for the rest of the time they lived in this house. Maybe it was good to have a reminder of all this.

Neither of them had really talked to each other during the work. Gordon hadn’t even brought up how surprised he was that Joe had ever touched dirt in his life. Once the grass was suitably wet, Joe washed out the wheelbarrow, something Gordon had never done during the time he’d owned it. He then turned to Gordon and asked him if he wanted help winding the hoses. Gordon, dazed, just shook his head no. Joe still wrapped his anyway. Once he was done he placed the coiled hose on the patio cement and headed for the gate.

But he stopped before leaving and turned back to Gordon one last time. “Hey, Gordon.”

“Yeah.”

“Take the morning off. I’ll see you after lunch.” And with that Joe walked out of the back yard.

**§§§**

When Cameron arrived at Joe’s, he wasn’t there. Normally she’d at least consider where he might be but she was too exhausted to bother. She collapsed onto his bed fully clothed and on top of the covers. Within minutes she was asleep, despite her waves of fear and worries about the careful trap she had just sent for Nathan Cardiff’s accounts.

An hour later she stirred when the front door to the apartment opened. She didn’t move; she felt like she couldn’t. She just opened her eyes and watched the entrance to the bedroom as Joe walked in . . . filthy, as if he just stepped out of a Paul Newman oil fields movie. It was enough to get Cameron to sit up.

“What happened?”

“I killed someone. Buried them outside of town.”

“Lemme guess. Gordon.”

“Bingo.” They traded tired smiles. He sat down on the bed next to her. “I think . . .I’ve been working too much.”

“Landscaping?”

“All of it.”

“Well. What’s the other option?”

Joe stared forward into nothing, searching. “There isn’t one.” She moved closer and ran her hands over his shoulders. He was unusually warm to the touch. He turned to her. “I’m taking the morning off.”

Cameron inched forward. “Good.” She nodded. “We’ve earned it.”

Joe smiled again, something relaxing in his chest, if only for a moment.

“Just the morning, though.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I just loved this! If you did too, leave a comment, and perhaps Chris will actually see it.


End file.
